Grindhouse! is a beautifully weird card game for two to four players set in the world of seventies B-movies. By collecting and playing production cards with the requisite values for the genre you're aiming for—and whatever review you're aiming to get—you complete a production and rake in bucks at the box office. Earn more money than your competition and you win the game!
Players collect and play Production Cards onto productions, in separate horizontal rows on the table in front of them, and can work on up to two at a time. There are four different "roles" for Production Cards: Directors (yellow), Actors (blue), On Set (red), and Post (green). Each card has a numeric cost indicating how many cards you must discard to play it on a production and most have one or more value symbols: afros, blood, boobs, buildings, explosions, fists, wheels, and reels.
A production that contains all four roles can be wrapped (completed) by playing a Genre Card and Review Card onto it. Both cards show a value cost—met or exceeded with the value symbols on the Production Cards—and a box office haul for your completed film.
Once a player has wrapped two productions (three in a two-player game), the game ends and box office receipts are totaled and the highest score wins.
- Works really good for a Halloween game
- Need to play this one
- Theme is too good
- Trapped in a contest by a host, involving being "hacked alive" and limbs being "hacked off."
- An old mansion that was once a slaughterhouse, known as the Grindhouse
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Limb loss — Limbs get hacked off during play.
- Survival — Players are trying to stay alive.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- I want to be scared. I want to be terrified. I want to be traumatized.
- And these games are going to give it to you.
- it really feels like you step into the movie Alien.
- Everything about this just screams Halloween to me.
- This has been on my list, again, kind of like Mansions of Madness for years. I've wanted this game for years because it just it's so so gruesome, but like I also need it.
- it really does stress you out.
- you're going to be having limbs that are hacked off and by the end everyone's just like dragging their corpses to the end trying to win.
- What makes The Night Cage so terrifying is you are moving through this map, and it's just this black and white map. You don't really know where you're going, and everyone is kind of holding a small little candle.
- Something about a spooky haunted train, man. I love it.